- Turkey To Conduct Major Test Of Russian S-400 Systems Despite US Sanctions Threat
Turkey To Conduct Major Test Of Russian S-400 Systems Despite US Sanctions Threat
Tyler Durden
Wed, 10/07/2020 – 02:45Long after the Trump administration indefinitely suspended deliveries of Lockheed Martin’s advanced stealth F-35 fighter to Turkey over its controversial deal with Russia to obtained the S-400 missile defense system, Ankara is ready to go ‘live’ with its Russian anti-air missiles in a comprehensive test.
Turkey was officially and finally kicked out of the F-35 program in summer of 2019, also amid threats of sanctions from Washington, as it was feared Russia could use the S-400 and its radar to obtain valuable and secret information from its Turkish partner on the Lockheed stealth fighter. This unwavering stance cost the United States at least half a billion dollars, according to reports at the time.
Via Russian Defense Ministry/AFP file Throughout the whole diplomatic saga and standoff which took US-Turkey relations to an all-time low, compounded by Turkey’s attacks on Syrian Kurds which were being supported by US troops in northern Syria, Ankara didn’t blink. This even as Washington offered the Patriot system as an alternative to Russian air defenses.
And now Turkey’s military is for the first time moving forward with field tests of the S-400. Bloomberg reports Tuesday that “Turkey is planning to conduct a comprehensive test of the S-400 missile-defense system it purchased from Russia next week, according to people familiar with the matter.”
“The air force isn’t activating the batteries, but testing equipment as well as the readiness of Turkish personnel at a site in Sinop province on the Black Sea coast, the people said,” Bloomberg continues.
Footage appears to be showing that Turkey has moved S-400s to Black Sea city of Samsun
A NOTAM was released that closes the airspace for 10 days due to air defense system/ drone exercises in Sinop, which might be the final destination via @kamerkncpic.twitter.com/vz1xtoP7vc
— Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) October 6, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
This has reportedly triggered a flurry of diplomatic activity and protest out of Washington, also as a new crisis is unfolding in the Eastern Mediterranean between Turkey, Greece, Cyprus and European allies. The EU and US have backed Greece and Cyprus in condemning expanded Turkish hydrocarbons exploration and drilling around Cyprus and near Greek islands.
According to Greek media reports, Turkey is already using radars provided Russia in connection with the S-400 systems to track Greek aircraft in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The Greek daily Ekathimerini writes, “The indications that Turkey activated the radars of its Russian-made S-400 anti-aircraft systems in order to detect US-made Greek F-16 fighter jets on their return from the Eunomia exercise on August 27 off Cyprus apparently sounded the alarm in Washington about the situation in the Eastern Mediterranean and reportedly prompted the visits by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Cyprus on September 12 and Greece on September 27-29.”
“The visits highlight how Ankara’s procurement of the S-400s is irking Washington, which has threatened to impose sanctions if the Russian system is activated,” Ekathimerini continues.
Thus whatever “message” Pompeo conveyed last month certainly appears to have gone unheeded given Turkey’s reported preparations to conduct tests of its S-400’s. Meanwhile Washington sanctions are still reportedly on the table. But of course Turkey could retaliate with measures of its own, including booting US forces from the country, as the inter-NATO rift continues.
- CIA Director Gina Haspel And The British Role In The Anti-Trump Plot
CIA Director Gina Haspel And The British Role In The Anti-Trump Plot
Tyler Durden
Wed, 10/07/2020 – 02:00Authored by Chris Farrell via The Gatestone Institute,
We have raised and discussed serious matters of fact and questions about the role of CIA Director Gina Haspel in the Anti-Trump conspiracy.
It appears Haspel (while serving as London Chief of Station from 2014 to early 2017) was an active, knowledgeable party to the efforts to target candidate Trump with an FBI-instigated foreign counterintelligence operation. That seditious conspiracy carried forward to a more sophisticated and aggressive plan to carry out a soft coup against President Donald J. Trump.
Looking back on news reporting concerning Haspel, we turn (with caution) to a Washington Post article from July 2019 by Scott Shane, titled: “The quiet director: How Gina Haspel manages the CIA’s volatile relationship with Trump”. We are supposed to believe that Haspel and her office did not cooperate with the reporter for the article. Shane disclaims Haspel involvement by writing:
“This report is based on interviews with 26 current and former officials who have worked with Haspel in the United States, particularly when she served in senior management roles at headquarters, and in London, where Haspel served two tours as the CIA’s top representative — chief of station — a plum post that is usually the steppingstone to the agency’s highest ranks.”
No Washington Post article in the last decade has contained such a scrupulous sourcing statement. Of course, Haspel had nothing to do with the article. Remember that, won’t you?
Haspel, twice-over Chief of Station in London, had close connections with the British intelligence and security services. Given the nature of the “special relationship” between the two countries, that is hardly surprising. Shane’s interviews of British intelligence officers take things a step further, however:
“… what she lacked in after-hours sociability she made up for with deep professional ties to the upper echelon of the British security establishment. ‘She had access to anyone in our service,’ the former British intelligence official said.”
Shane goes on to explain:
“Haspel has become the CIA’s linchpin to the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, its most important foreign partner. Her British colleagues say that she knows them so well — warts and all — that they call her the ‘honorary U.K. desk officer.'”
In the next paragraph, Shane notes breathlessly:
“… Trump has accused the United Kingdom of conspiring with American intelligence to spy on his presidential campaign.”
President Trump certainly has made that claim, and one believes for very good reasons that seem to compound weekly. Reasons that make the “intelligence community” and 95% of “official Washington” extremely nervous. It is the sort of statement that presidential aides and counsels look nervous about, wring their hands and respectfully, earnestly plead: “But Mr. President, you just can’t say that sort of thing!” Truth be damned.
Concurrent with the FBI’s anti-Trump foreign counterintelligence operation, launched from the United Kingdom (with Haspel’s affirmative “coordination”), keep in mind that the UK’s version of the National Security Agency — the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) — was engaged in an aggressive Signals Intelligence campaign later codified in UK law as the Investigatory Powers Act (and referred to colloquially as the “Snoopers’ Charter”). Having the British run an aggressive intelligence collection operation against Team Trump targets, bypassing US legal prohibitions, and then laundering the intelligence “take” back to US officials via the UK-US liaison relationship is precisely something an “honorary UK desk officer” might be good and adept at accomplishing.
Certainly, these subjects and questions deserve closer examination, without the phony prophylactic defense of grave warnings about “sources and methods.” No one examining the coup against President Trump is seriously interested in the precise technical collection techniques of GCHQ — they just want to know if the Brits were involved in an attempt to subvert a presidential campaign and then overturn the results of an election. CIA Director Gina Haspel can answer all of those questions, and she does not even have to touch upon classified information to do so. The American public is due her answers.
- Financialization & The Road To Zero, Part 4: Wars, Waste, Wall Street, Welfare, & What's Next
Financialization & The Road To Zero, Part 4: Wars, Waste, Wall Street, Welfare, & What’s Next
Tyler Durden
Wed, 10/07/2020 – 00:05Authored by ‘ICE-9’ via The Burning Platform blog,
This is Part 4 of a 4-part series.
What Financialization Really Is
But what really is financialization? Its simplest definition is, separated from the buzz and energy of its surface world, the present hedging of an entire nation’s aggregate asset value plus the hedging of all future profits derived from these assets in every sector of the economy, both public and private. This hedge is accomplished through maximizing the amount of debt leveraged against every conceivable tangible, intangible, and imaginary asset class, including the national citizenry. In perfectly efficient financialization, all accumulated liabilities eventually balance to zero against the aggregate net present value of the national asset base, plus all future profits generated by that asset base. Maximizing this leverage is accomplished through a coordinated program of zero real interest rates (or less), combined with the creation of tens of trillions in new fiat money used by first-tier recipients – i.e., Federal Reserve System member banks – to monetize this national asset base. Thus financialization is, at its core, the national descent into zero aggregate net present value and is, for lack of better terminology, the great cashing-in of an entire nation by its financial overlords.
When this national asset base and all its future profits are fully monetized with debt, the entire ownership and control of the national economy are transferred from stock owners (second tier unsecured liens) to bond owners (first tier secured liens). Therefore, full and efficient financialization turns the entire focus of national economic endeavor away from generating profits that fund discretionary capital investments that lead to collective economic growth, towards generating revenue to cover ever increasing non-discretionary interest payments for a concentrated select group of bond holders. Growth sustaining capital investments eventually evaporate as these increasing interest payments devour more and more discretionary spending, and thus “business” becomes a quest to continually whittle away at its remaining discretionary cost base, like labor and innovation, while simultaneously acting out a facade surrounding “shareholder value” for the decreasing number of shareholders who become increasingly irrelevant with every new corporate bond issue and share buy-back. This change in the national asset base ownership therefore turns the stock market into a giant casino as “profits” derived from short positions are just wealth transfers from one party to another in a zero sum game, and long positions become entirely dependent upon the amount of inflation generated by increased fiat money creation that drives up both asset “values” and net cash flows from stagnant unit sales in a declining wage environment. The nation is hollowed out as capital spending dries up, economic growth in real terms turns negative, and the entire investment “economy” is dependent upon ever increasing inflation driven by ever increasing Federal debt sales. Thus in a perfectly financialized private sector, the lien holders control the “value” and the stock owners hold the bets.
As capital spending and real growth evaporate, it falls to government to provide more and more of the “stimulus” that drives economic endeavor. But as government is ultimately concerned only with politics, their spending programs serve to primarily sustain the Four Pillars of the new economic model – Wars, Waste, Wall Street, and Welfare. As financialization matures, it establishes a permanent decline in the national standard of living as efficient financialization demands either minimal wages or foreign outsourced labor arbitrage. For those occupations that cannot be outsourced, wages get reduced below that required to support one’s self and family, so government steps in with its “Great Society” that is in reality a subsidy for the transfer of wages into interest payments. Thus all welfare is ultimately a corporate subsidy as efficient financialization matures. So when private economic endeavors are squashed through regulation or competition with corporate entities and the majority of the national citizenry are welfare recipients, discretionary capital spending will end, growth will cease, and real economic activity grinds to a halt.
So financialization is not only a national descent into zero net present value, it is a national descent into zero collective drive, zero collective motivation, and zero coordinated direction. It is fundamentally opposite to that of the natural human state of people within a complex society practicing the social interactions of labor barter and trade among individuals. As financialization matures through the destruction of individual economic endeavor, the formation of corporate monopoly cartels, and the transformation of society into a pool of government dependents, it cancels the fundamental underlying conditions of individual membership within society and replaces social intercourse not only with alienation from the means of production, but alienation from one’s fellow members in society.
Thus financialization is, ultimately, the national descent into zero coherence and zero rationality.
It is in fact, the breakdown of society its self. It is the Road to Zero.
This perfectly efficient financialization works equally in the public sector through all levels of government and has been working nearly undetected in the United States for 149 years. The District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871 incorporated and privatized THE UNITED STATES when the country was bankrupt due to its insurmountable Civil War debts. It was by no coincidence that a bankrupt United States, depleted of its gold reserves, reemerged six years later as THE UNITED STATES and, although bankrupt, was able to pass the Coinage Act of 1873, end bimetallism, and magically have enough gold to return to both a gold standard and a fully functioning fractional reserve banking system – i.e., mature classical capitalism out of the ashes of war and bankruptcy. This sudden appearance of gold was likely the original Faustian deal to sell out the American people, and in return this new privatized form of Federal government and all its departments – including the military – were placed into unspecified ownership, likely the same parties that assumed the Civil War debts, and put a permanent end to Federalism “for the People”. The nation’s new owners lay relatively dormant until they forced through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and pushed America into WWI to destroy Germany on behalf of the central bank cross ownership nexus. Since 1913, the nation’s owners have raised their heads from time to time – the Roaring 20s stock market bubble, the Great Depression, the Roosevelt coup plot, WWII, the Cold War, Kennedy’s assassination, and 9/11. But the final bill came due 100 years after the deal with the Devil was struck and those Civil War debts were finally called in. So for 100 years, Americans have been living within a great hypothecation until the starting gun of the Nixon Shock signaled the beginning of cashing-in on THE UNITED STATES. Thus much of the national angst that has accumulated since 1971 can be explained as the conflict between the true national owners and those who believe they are its owners. And much of the national citizenry still believe they are the national owners because they have yet to perceive that The United States “for the People” has transformed into THE UNITED STATES “of the People” and is now nothing more than a bank with a standing army.
The public sector’s main financialization vehicle is the Federal issue of US Treasury bills. In perfectly efficient financialization, real interest rates are zero or below and discounting is not required, so cumulative federal debt issuance can equal the “value” of the national asset base plus annual national GDP times the remaining number of years a nation is expected to function. E.g., if a nation’s asset base is worth $225 trillion and annual GDP is $25 trillion per year, and the central bank cross ownership nexus has set a remaining national life of 10 years, when Federal debt issuance reaches a cumulative $475 trillion at zero real interest rates, that nation’s public sector has been efficiently financialized. These zero real interest rates are important as they do not erode through discounting the cumulative expected national GDP and thus allow maximum Federal debt issuance, and therefore maximum “value” extraction over the remaining functional life of a nation.
Other public sector financialization mechanisms include bond issuance at successively lower levels of government. These bond issues allow for maximizing macroscopic debt issuance at a cumulative national level as they are merely successive re-hypothecations of underlying asset “values” and their future income streams already pledged at the Federal level. E.g., debt issued at state level backed by state assets and future income streams have already been pledged in the Federal US Treasury bill issuance and accounted for in national GDP. County debt issuance backed by county assets and future income streams have already been pledged in the state debt issuance and accounted for in state GDP, and so on down through city bond issues, utility bond issues, school district bond issues, et cetera. Thus from this multi-level re-hypothecation of over-lapping pledged assets and future income streams, through the magic formula of fiat money working together with financialization, the national asset base plus total cumulative future GDP can be leveraged at multipliers greater than one.
Yet another public sector financialization mechanism is public civil infrastructure at all levels of government. Water corporations, storm drain networks, government buildings, passenger rail services, sewage plants, hospitals, highways, and fresh water aquifers are sold off – usually for cents on the dollar – and turned into quasi-bond issues for interest generating entities paid for by “public use fees”. Public land confiscation under pretense of environmental conservation is also a common public sector financialization mechanism. The 1973 Endangered Species Act – passed by Congress soon after the Nixon Shock – legalized the termination of private lease-holdings and confiscated vast tracts of public land to create scores of nondescript national monuments, national forests, preserves, wildlife sanctuaries et cetera. This expanding federally owned land portfolio is used to increase the collective national asset base for monetization and is, in actuality, a collateral pool of last resort for use in the next Federal default comprising 28% of all US territory. Similar land confiscation programs exists at the state, county, city, and school district levels where the primary mechanism of confiscation here are tax nonpayment liens and eminent domain. Thus public sector financialization is, in unadorned language, the process by which a nation is strip mined by the central bank cross ownership nexus and where its children one day really do wake up homeless on the continent their forefathers conquered.
There are five processes that facilitate financialization – the legal framework, de-industrialization, inflation, propaganda, and a creeping police state. Several significant individual acts of law have already been described that allowed the transition from capitalism into financialization to proceed unopposed, but the most relevant legal elements are contained within the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871 that not only turned The United States into a private corporation under undisclosed ownership, but also established a dual Constitution without ratification via an Article V Convention. This illegal constitution altered the scope of Federal governance from that acting “for the People”, to that acting “of the People”, which is a meaningless legal term that renders the entire American population disenfranchised from the scope of Federal governance objectives. Since 1871, the true ownership of THE UNITED STATES has remained unstated, and legally this is important as an unstated corporate ownership here has the equivalence of stating that “We the People” do not own our own country. So it is no wonder that for most of the last 129 years the actors within Federal government may change but their outcomes never do. Only when one realizes that the primary purpose of Federal government since 1971 is to pile as much debt as possible onto the heads “of the People” can financialization be truly understood, and one can finally make logical sense from the perspective of who ultimately benefits from this national journey down the Road to Zero.
De-industrialization was necessary to support the growing issuance of US Treasury bills needed to achieve perfectly efficient financialization of the national asset base. The coarse workings of the American Fiat Empire’s “virtuous cycle” had to be altered after the Nixon Shock as US economic growth in value added exports had stalled, the aggregate US industrial base was too expensive to modernize, and a run on US gold reserves had left the country technically bankrupt under the constraints of a fractional reserve banking system. Thus by the beginning of the 1970s the usefulness of the American industrialization cycle to the central bank cross ownership nexus had played itself out, but some alternative to American value added exports was needed to keep the “virtuous cycle” functioning lest the Soviet Union and its ruble expropriate world reserve currency status. So outsourcing the US value added export economy to the likes of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea was the solution, with America now the importer of value added goods paid for in US dollars that generated foreign US dollar earnings that returned to the United States through the “soft” avenues in the Fiat Empire’s “virtuous cycle” to buy US Treasury bills. Thus Federal government policy post-1971 was to aid and abet the destruction of the US American value added export capacity along with the elimination of millions of well-paying skilled factory jobs in order to pass US dollar earnings on to foreign nations that would then return these US dollars to the United States with the purchase of US Treasury bills. But despite all this destruction of American factories and their well-paying jobs, the Fiat Empire’s “virtuous cycle” kept operating as before at the macroscopic level. But once down the de-industrialization path, the Federal government could never allow the return of US value added export capacity as these exports would compete for foreign held US dollars with US Treasury bills, and if enough value added export goods were produced and sold in US dollars to foreign nations, that would reduce the amount of US Treasury bills sold, strengthen the US dollar, and put the American financialization project at risk by neutering the facilitating process of inflation.
As perfectly efficient financialization progresses and the national net present value approaches zero, the inflation generated through continuous US Treasury bill issuance drives the aggregate national asset base “value” higher, and each uptick in aggregate asset “value” underwrites ever more Federal debt issuance against what would otherwise be, in an inflation-less world, a static aggregate asset “value” with a finite amount of potential liens. As inflation churns away and aggregate asset “values” rise, the national zero net present value point gets pushed further into the future and thus more cumulative debt can be issued over a longer period of time. If inflation were to run high enough for long enough, Federal debt issuance could theoretically go on indefinitely and fund Wars, Waste, Wall Street, and Welfare forever despite the country producing next to nothing of true value. Inflation also has the same effect on national aggregate revenue streams, and this is why deflation can grind the financialized economy to a halt as its entire workings are dependent upon the inflation that drives an increasing national asset “value” that drives the never ending issue of US Treasury bills that drives the inflation circulus in probando. But with deflation, the aggregate national asset “value” shrinks, and US Treasury bill issuance can either stop – which means no more Wars, Waste, Wall Street, or Welfare – or continue and trigger hyper-inflation yet still salvage the Wars, Waste, Wall Street, and Welfare.
Deflation is also the Achilles Heel of US national security since crippling economic crises can be easily engineered by foreign players that, either willingly or by coincidence, collectively do not buy US Treasury bills as did happen starting in 2014. Thus as the Fiat Empire goes, not buying US Treasury bills is in effect a declaration of war “by other means” and is why since 2019 the Federal Reserve System has been frantically buying up its own debt to save the Wars, Waste, Wall Street, and Welfare at all (socialized) costs. So the magic formula of creating money out of thin air births the creation of even more money out of thin air through inflation, and when the magic runs out and the rabbit insists on staying inside the hat, the abomination of deflation is released. Thus inflation is the secret ingredient that drives asset prices ever higher and makes the wealthy asset holders even wealthier with every multi-billion dollar US Treasury bill auction. But the cost of inflation is borne primarily by those who do not hold assets and cannot afford inflation, so inflation is thereby socialized through the mugs and dupes that make up “of the People”. Deflation on the other hand, although the bringer of immediate economic carnage to a financialized economy, is over the long term the ultimate re-distributor, the bringer of equity and equilibrium, and the destroyer of the wealthy. So, financialization is, by design, socialism for the rich, and deflation is thus the unwinding of this socialism and the cleansing reversion to the mean.
We are all familiar with the sustained and incessant propaganda campaign that we experience every day. That unsolicited red, white, and blue bunting on city streets, the spectacular 4th of July fireworks display, the F-35 flyover at the football game, and a special appearance by Uncle Sam on Stilts at this year’s patriotic flag waving parade. But what we often do not perceive is our willing participation in these displays, the need to be drawn into rituals that block our subconscious knowledge that something really is seriously wrong with the nation, and these things that are seriously wrong will never be fixed. So as this collective subconscious block grows, the more manufactured and elaborate these patriotic displays become – the harder we wave those flags, the louder we sing the Star Spangled Banner, the more ferociously we vote, and the more vigorously we do what effectively amounts to nothing. It is when this collective block descends over our collective impotence that we then enter the final stages of financialization and the police state.
When financialization matures to the point where in its real world underbelly tens of millions have been disenfranchised from participating in economic activity, while its surface world screams about new all-time highs and the exotic travel tastes of tech trillionaires and their celebrity friends, the police state becomes the final, logical solution to keep “of the People” in check while the final pennies are plucked from the national carcass. It is no coincidence that the Patriot Act was passed by Congress a mere 45 days after the 9/11 controlled demolitions, and it will be the vehicle by which the dissenting and disenfranchised will find themselves branded as “terrorists”, gathered up into the box cars, and shipped away to be disappeared by the millions. Clean, efficient, cheap elimination, sustainable and always environmentally friendly. And it will be at that point, in these cramped box cars, within these hot and stinking quarters during that collective silence where time is suspended between repeating clanks of iron on iron and the hypnotic rhythm of the carriage roll, it is here where “of the people” will ponder upon why they did not wake up, why they did not wise up, and why they did not rise up. And so these thoughts go, box car after box car, train after train, day after day. And as the trains slow into the camps, “of the People” will finally experience the epiphany of just how few individuals there were who ruled over the world, but will also discover too late just how few bullets would have fixed things early, how little blood need be shed to derail this Road to Zero.
- Top US Food Bank Warns Of Nationwide "Meal Shortages" In Next 12 Months
Top US Food Bank Warns Of Nationwide “Meal Shortages” In Next 12 Months
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 23:45The virus pandemic and resulting recession, crushing millions of households, has produced a new era of hunger nationwide. After seven months of the coronavirus chaos, triggering widespread unemployment and the collapse of small businesses, millions of Americans are going hungry for the first time in their lives ahead of the holiday season.
Tens of millions of Americans have turned to their local food banks as food insecurity spirals out of control. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey from late August, about 10% of adults, 22.3 million, reported they didn’t have enough to eat or lacked food. This figure is up from 18 million in early March.
Now, Feeding America, a nationwide network of more than 200 food banks, serving more than 46 million people, is warning it may experience a massive food shortage within the next twelve months, reported WaPo.
Feeding America said it could face a deficit of “10 billion pound shortfall between now and June of 2021 – the equivalent of 8 billion meals.”
In July, the nonprofit organization “estimated the total need for charitable food over the next year would be an unprecedented 17 billion pounds, more than three times the food bank network’s last annual distribution of 5 billion pounds.”
Rising food insecurity comes as the economy faces a tidal wave of long-term unemployment as millions of people who lost jobs early in the pandemic and remain out of work, unable to find a job, as job losses increasingly become permanent.
At the moment, nearly 4 million jobs have vanished forever. Two problems are developed: rising long-term unemployment and permanent job losses, the combination of the two create deep economic scarring and immense financial pain for households.
The Salvation Army recently launched its annual holiday fundraising campaign early this year, for the first time in 130 years, in a bid to “rescue Christmas” to support those households financially ruined by the economic downturn.
As concerns over economic recovery grow, with a flurry of corporate layoffs in recent weeks, we’ve reminded readers that food bank lines are increasing once again:
- Hawaii Food Bank Sees “Stunning” Increase In Meals Served
- Wisconsin Food Bank Warns: “We’re Not Going Back To Normal Anytime Soon”
- Dramatic Photos: Desperate For Provisions, Thousands Of Cars Line Up At Texas Food Bank
The grim reality is that economic revival touted by President Trump is merely an election campaign mirage of hope that will quickly fade after the elections. The economy is desperately in need of another round of stimulus. The problem with fiscal injections used for consumption is that it’s only a short-term sugar high that ends in a crash if more is not seen.
America’s food insecurity crisis is getting worse, not better, as millions of folks now rely on food banks as the virus-induced recession is will be felt for years.
- Sellin: Are Global Scientific Elites Trying To Bury The Truth About COVID-19's Origin?
Sellin: Are Global Scientific Elites Trying To Bury The Truth About COVID-19’s Origin?
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 23:25Authored by Col. Lawrence Sellin (Ret.) via Citizens Commission on National Security,
There may be some culpability involved, but the huge resistance being mounted by the international scientific elite, the media and vested financial interests against conducting an objective analysis of the origin of the COVID-19 virus is primarily about money.
If it would be determined that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from a laboratory leak of a genetically engineered virus, it would not only disrupt the flow of huge sums of research funding, but adversely affect the investments of those vehemently opposed to President Donald Trump’s efforts to make the U.S. economy less dependent on China and, therefore, make the U.S. less vulnerable to Chinese geopolitical blackmail.
There is growing scientific evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic may have resulted from a vaccine development project gone wrong.
Live-attenuated vaccines are a type of vaccine used for smallpox and childhood diseases like measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox, in which a weakened or “attenuated” form of the virus that causes the disease is manufactured.
Because such vaccines are so similar to the natural infection that they help prevent, they create a strong and long-lasting, even lifetime immune response.
Live-attenuated virus vaccines must possess certain characteristics to be safe and effective.
They must have lower virulence and replication capability than the natural pathogenic form of the virus, but be able to induce a pronounced immune response.
Of additional importance is that the live-attenuated virus vaccines should clear quickly from the body and not revert or mutate back to the natural pathogenic form.
To fulfill those characteristics, certain modifications providing protection strategies, or “circuit breakers,” must be engineered into the viral genome, which are also potential markers of artificial manipulation.
An ad hoc group of scientific investigators known as DRASTIC have compiled a 36-point list to buttress their claim that the COVID-19 virus could have originated in a vaccine development program.
For example, a central mechanism for controlling immune responses is mediated by interferons. The COVID-19 virus seems to have some signatures in its genome which indicate interferon hypersensitivity compared to the coronavirus responsible for the 2002-2003 pandemic.
Another indication that the COVID-19 virus may have been the product of an attempt to produce a live-attenuated virus vaccine is the accumulation of “synonymous mutations” in the spike protein compared to RaTG13, which the global scientific elite claim is the nearest bat coronavirus relative.
The artificial accumulation of synonymous mutations has been described as one method of producing live-attenuated virus vaccines by “deoptimizing” the genetic code and inhibiting replication.
The most striking indication of genetic manipulation of the COVID-19 virus is the presence of the furin polybasic cleavage site, which does not exist in any closely-related bat coronavirus yet identified.
Given its role in the virus-cell or cell-cell membrane fusion process, the DRASTIC team suggests that the insertion of the furin polybasic cleavage site may have been related to a high-risk attempt to produce an intranasal “self-spreading” vaccine spray.
“Self-spreading vaccines are essentially genetically engineered viruses designed to move through populations in the same way as infectious diseases, but rather than causing disease, they confer protection.”
Obviously, much could go wrong using such an approach.
To avoid the scientific equivalent of the Russia collusion hoax, the Trump Administration should not rely on the international scientific elite, the media and vested financial interests to shape the debate, but should appoint an independent and objective task force to determine the true origin of the COVID-19 virus.
Given the power of genetic engineering and the enormous danger when it is recklessly applied, the stakes are just too high not to address this issue honestly and directly.
* * *
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is retired from an international career in business and medical research with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. He is a member of the Citizens Commission on National Security.
- "On Some Measures, Inflation Is Already Above 2.5%": Inflationary Lessons From The Used Car Market
“On Some Measures, Inflation Is Already Above 2.5%”: Inflationary Lessons From The Used Car Market
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 23:05Last week, when discussing an emerging problem facing the Fed which is desperately trying to find inflation, we said that “inflation is already here” as the latest PCE data showed prices rebounding significantly, rising 0.4% over three months compared with the prior three months, on an annualized basis. CPI was still showing prices falling on that basis, although in August the reopening of the economy pushed three-month annualized CPI inflation above 3%.
Today, UBS economist Paul Donovan made precisely that point, writing that “Fed President Evans yesterday indicated the Fed may be comfortable with 2.5% inflation” but “Inflation is over 2.5% already—on some measures. Inflation inequality causes most people to experience inflation that is higher than reported. And the growth of online retail means that different consumers can be charged different prices for the same things. The signal from central banks is that rates stay low if some inflation measures rise, but there is more to inflation than giving out random numbers greater than 2.0%.”
He’s right… and one place where the Fed can learn some lessons about surging inflation is the used car market, which as BofA chief economist Ethan Harris writes, “tells us a lot about the nature of the COVID shock, and it is having a notable impact on macro data.”
Pointing to the “confluence of supply and demand forces which has created a shortage of used cars”, Harris notes that “given the state of the world, perhaps it is appropriate that used cars are an important factor driving the economy.”
As Harris elaborates, on the supply side the two month shutdown in auto production has created a shortage of new cars that spilled over into the used market. In addition, the weak economy is encouraging car owners to delay trading up into a new car. Meanwhile, on the demand side, the COVID crisis has caused people to shy away from public transportation and ride services. These supply and demand shifts have more than offset the increase in supply from rental car companies selling some of their fleet.
As a result, used cars are impacting both inflation and real activity: in July and August combined, used-car prices soared by 7.7%, the biggest two-month increase since 1969. And since used cars and trucks make up 2.75% of the CPI basket, this surge alone has added 0.2% to the overall index, which as BofA notes, is “a lot when inflation is this low.”
Meanwhile, used cars have also contributed to the V-shaped recovery in goods consumption, falling a cumulative 31% from February to April and then jumping 68% in the next two months.
Yet what goes up must come down, and the cooling off of the used car market is already in the works: auto manufacturers did not have their usual summer shutdown this year, and are starting to restore inventories to normal. Fleet sales continue to be weak as there is no rebound in the rental market in sight. At the same time, a good chunk of the normal cost advantage in buying a used car has been eroded as new car companies push for greater sales.
According to the Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index, used car inflation is already slowing, a leading sign of weaker retail prices.
Finally, the used car market has benefited from the big tax cuts and increased transfer receipts in the spring. Low income families benefitted the most and those benefits are fading. Real spending on used cars actually slowed in both July and August
And now that a new stimulus bill seems unlikely until the election, and potentially well beyond, it is only a matter of time before the sugar hike spending surge from this summer reverses with a bang, sending prices sharply lower over the coming months.
- "There Are Trillions At Stake…" – How Washington Really Works, & Why Its Denizens Despise Trump
“There Are Trillions At Stake…” – How Washington Really Works, & Why Its Denizens Despise Trump
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 22:45Authored by ‘sundance’ via The Burning Platform blog,
With 30-days left before the election perhaps it’s worthwhile remembering what all of this opposition is about… Something 99% of American voters do not quite understand.
Congress doesn’t actually write legislation. The last item of legislation written by congress was sometime around the mid 1990’s. Modern legislation is sub-contracted to a segment of DC operations known as K-Street. That’s where the lobbyists reside.
Lobbyists write the laws; congress sells the laws; lobbyists then pay congress lucrative commissions for passing their laws. That’s the modern legislative business in DC.
When we talk about paying-off politicians in third-world countries we call it bribery. However, when we undertake the same process in the U.S. we call it “lobbying”.
CTH often describes the system with the phrase: “There are Trillions at Stake.” The process of creating legislation is behind that phrase. DC politics is not quite based on the ideas that frame most voter’s reference points.
With people taking notice of DC politics for the first time; and with people not as familiar with the purpose of DC politics; perhaps it is valuable to provide clarity.
Most people think when they vote for a federal politician -a House or Senate representative- they are voting for a person who will go to Washington DC and write or enact legislation. This is the old-fashioned “schoolhouse rock” perspective based on decades past. There is not a single person in congress writing legislation or laws.
In modern politics not a single member of the House of Representatives or Senator writes a law, or puts pen to paper to write out a legislative construct. This simply doesn’t happen.
Over the past several decades a system of constructing legislation has taken over Washington DC that more resembles a business operation than a legislative body.
Here’s how it works right now.
Outside groups, often called “special interest groups”, are entities that represent their interests in legislative constructs. These groups are often representing foreign governments, Wall Street multinational corporations, banks, financial groups or businesses; or smaller groups of people with a similar connection who come together and form a larger group under an umbrella of interest specific to their affiliation.
Sometimes the groups are social interest groups; activists, climate groups, environmental interests etc. The social interest groups are usually non-profit constructs who depend on the expenditures of government to sustain their cause or need.
The for-profit groups (mostly business) have a purpose in Washington DC to shape policy, legislation and laws favorable to their interests. They have fully staffed offices just like any business would – only their ‘business‘ is getting legislation for their unique interests.
These groups are filled with highly-paid lawyers who represent the interests of the entity and actually write laws and legislation briefs.
In the modern era this is actually the origination of the laws that we eventually see passed by congress. Within the walls of these buildings within Washington DC is where the ‘sausage’ is actually made.
Again, no elected official is usually part of this law origination process.
Almost all legislation created is not ‘high profile’, they are obscure changes to current laws, regulations or policies that no-one pays attention to. The passage of the general bills within legislation is not covered in media. Ninety-nine percent of legislative activity happens without anyone outside the system even paying any attention to it.
Once the corporation or representative organizational entity has written the law they want to see passed – they hand it off to the lobbyists.
The lobbyists are people who have deep contacts within the political bodies of the legislative branch, usually former House/Senate staff or former House/Senate politicians themselves.
The lobbyist takes the written brief, the legislative construct, and it’s their job to go to congress and sell it.
“Selling it” means finding politicians who will accept the brief, sponsor their bill and eventually get it to a vote and passage. The lobbyist does this by visiting the politician in their office, or, most currently familiar, by inviting the politician to an event they are hosting. The event is called a junket when it involves travel.
Often the lobbying “event” might be a weekend trip to a ski resort, or a “conference” that takes place at a resort. The actual sales pitch for the bill is usually not too long and the majority of the time is just like a mini vacation etc.
The size of the indulgence within the event, the amount of money the lobbyist is spending, is customarily related to the scale of benefit within the bill the sponsoring business entity is pushing. If the sponsoring business or interest group can gain a lot of financial benefit from the legislation they spend a lot on the indulgences.
Recap: Corporations, mostly modern multinationals (special interest group), write the legislation. The corporations then contract the lobbyists. Lobbyists then take the law and go find politician(s) to support it. Politicians get support from their peers using tenure and status etc. Eventually, if things go according to norm, the legislation gets a vote.
Within every step of the process there are expense account lunches, dinners, trips, venue tickets and a host of other customary financial way-points to generate/leverage a successful outcome. The amount of money spent is proportional to the benefit derived from the outcome.
The important part to remember is that the origination of the entire process is EXTERNAL to congress.
Congress does not write laws or legislation, special interest groups do. Lobbyists are paid, some very well paid, to get politicians to go along with the need of the legislative group.
When you are voting for a Congressional Rep or a U.S. Senator you are not voting for a person who will write laws. Your rep only votes on legislation to approve or disapprove of constructs that are written by outside groups and sold to them through lobbyists who work for those outside groups.
While all of this is happening the same outside groups who write the laws are providing money for the campaigns of the politicians they need to pass them. This construct sets up the quid-pro-quo of influence, although much of it is fraught with plausible deniability.
This is the way legislation is created.
If your frame of reference is not established in this basic understanding you can often fall into the trap of viewing a politician, or political vote, through a false prism.
The modern origin of all legislative constructs is not within congress.
“We have to pass the bill to, well, find out what is in the bill” etc. ~ Nancy Pelosi 2009
“We rely upon the stupidity of the American voter” ~ Johnathan Gruber 2011, 2012.
“If Congress isn’t going to convene until the bill is ready to vote on… who the hell is writing the bill?” ~ Tom Massie, 2020
Once you understand this process you can understand how politicians get rich.
When a House or Senate member becomes educated on the intent of the legislation, they have attended the sales pitch; and when they find out the likelihood of support for that legislation; they can then position their own (or their families) financial interests to benefit from the consequence of passage. It is a process similar to insider trading on Wall Street, except the trading is based on knowing who will benefit from a legislative passage.
The legislative construct passes from K-Street into the halls of congress through congressional committees. The law originates from the committee to the full House or Senate. Committee seats which vote on these bills are therefore more valuable to the lobbyists. Chairs of these committees are exponentially more valuable.
Now, think about this reality against the backdrop of the 2016 Presidential Election. Legislation is passed based on ideology. In the aftermath of the 2016 election the system within DC was not structurally set-up to receive a Donald Trump presidency.
If Hillary Clinton had won the election, her Oval Office desk would be filled with legislation passed by congress which she would have been signing. Heck, she’d have writer’s cramp from all of the special interest legislation, driven by special interest groups that supported her campaign, that would be flowing to her desk.
Why?
Simply because the authors of the legislation, the originating special interest and lobbying groups, were spending millions to fund her campaign. Hillary Clinton would be signing K-Street constructed special interest legislation to repay all of those donors/investors.
Congress would be fast-tracking the passage because the same interest groups also fund the members of congress.
President Donald Trump winning the election threw a monkey wrench into the entire DC system…. In early 2017 the modern legislative machine was frozen in place.
The “America First” policies represented by candidate Donald Trump were not within the legislative constructs coming from the K-Street authors of the legislation. There were no MAGA lobbyists waiting on Trump ideology to advance legislation based on America First objectives.
As a result of an empty feeder system, in early 2017 congress had no bills to advance because all of the myriad of bills and briefs written were not in line with President Trump policy. There was simply no entity within DC writing legislation that was in-line with President Trump’s America-First’ economic and foreign policy agenda.
Exactly the opposite was true. All of the DC legislative briefs and constructs were/are antithetical to Trump policy. There were hundreds of file boxes filled with thousands of legislative constructs that became worthless when Donald Trump won the election.
Those legislative constructs (briefs) representing tens of millions of dollars worth of time and influence were just sitting there piled up in boxes under desks and in closets amid K-Street and the congressional offices. Legislation needed to be in-line with an entire new political perspective, and there was no-one, no special interest or lobbying group, currently occupying DC office space with any interest in synergy with Trump policy.
Think about the larger ramifications within that truism. That is also why there was/is so much opposition.
No legislation provided by outside interests means no work for lobbyists who sell it. No work means no money. No money means no expense accounts. No expenses means politicians paying for their own indulgences etc.
Politicians were not happy without their indulgences, but the issue was actually bigger. No K-Street expenditures also means no personal benefit; and no opportunity to advance financial benefit from the insider trading system. Republicans and democrats hate the presidency of Donald Trump because it is hurting them financially.
President Trump is not figuratively hurting the financial livelihoods of DC politicians; he’s literally doing it. President Trump is not an esoteric problem for them; his impact is very real, very direct, and hits almost every politician in the most painful place imaginable, the bank account.
In the pre-Trump process there were millions upon millions, even billions that could be made by DC politicians and their families. Thousands of very indulgent and exclusive livelihoods attached to the DC business model. At the center of this operation is the lobbying and legislative purchase network. The Big Club.
Without the ability to position personal wealth and benefit from the system, why would a politician stay in office? It is a fact the income of many long-term politicians on both wings of the uniparty bird were completely disrupted by Trump winning the 2016 election. That is one of the key reasons why so many politicians retired in 2018.
When we understand the business of DC, we understand the difference between legislation with a traditional purpose and modern legislation with a financial and political agenda.
When we understand the business of DC we understand why the entire network hates President Donald Trump.
Lastly, this is why -when signing legislation- President Trump often says “they’ve been trying to get this through for a long time” etc. Most of the legislation that is passed by congress, and signed by President Trump in his first term; is older legislative proposals, with little indulgent value that were shelved in years past.
Example: Criminal justice reform did not carry a financial benefit to the legislative bodies, and there was no financial interest funding the politicians to pass the bill. If you look at most of the bills President Trump has signed, with the exception of a few economic bills, they stem from congressional construction many years, even decades, ago.
Think about it carefully and you’ll see it. The “First step act”, “Right to Try”, etc. were all shelved by Boehner, Pelosi, Ryan, McConnell, Reid and others before them. When the value of legislation is measured by the financial underwriting and payoffs behind it, what type of legislative calendar does that require?….
Repeal the 17th amendment and watch what happens.
- Smart Homes Of 2040 Could Have Hanging "Butler Robots" To Assist Elderly
Smart Homes Of 2040 Could Have Hanging “Butler Robots” To Assist Elderly
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 22:25Researchers at Toyota Research Institute (TRI) have unveiled the future of robots for the smart home, with a collection of new machines trained to assist the elderly, reported The Verge.
TRI is concerned about the upcoming worldwide demographic Armageddon. From 2020-2040, growth will be flat among the child-bearing population. Meanwhile, 40-70-year-olds will rise in total population size, but 70-80-year-olds, and particularly the 80+-year-olds, will see large increases.
The older population’s future surge will be a demographic timebomb that will strain many western economies. TRI believes it could alleviate some of the pressure by providing at-home robots to assist older generations.
TRI recently offered the world a glimpse into a mock-up home environment built in its labs in California, where it has been testing its prototype robots. One of the robots it’s testing is called the “gantry robot,” which is suspended from the ceiling and can complete basic kitchen tasks like cleaning dishes.
“Toyota says the robot’s design was inspired by trips to Japanese homes, where researchers found that limited floor space would constrain a robot’s ability to help. Their solution was to imagine a future home built with robots directly integrated into the architecture. Building new robot-assisted homes from scratch would create its own problems, of course, but the design itself does solve some issues,” said The Verge.
Dan Helmick, co-lead of robotics fleet learning at TRI, said the robot navigates the ceiling and avoids clutter on the floor.
“What if instead of needing a robot to navigate the cluttered floor, it could travel on the ceiling instead, and be tucked out of the way when it’s not needed,” said Helmick.
And imagine, by 2040, the oldest millennial will be roughly 63 years old, which means they could very likely have these butler robots suspended from their ceilings, aiding them in daily tasks around the house.
But will the broke millennials of today be able to afford these future robots?
- Only Full Transparency Will Save The CIA And FBI Now
Only Full Transparency Will Save The CIA And FBI Now
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 22:05Authored by Roger Simon via The Epoch Times,
If The Federalist’s Sean Davis’ informants are even half right, director of the Central Intelligence Agency Gina Haspel is making a big mistake – for herself, for the CIA, and, above all, for the country.
Davis wrote:
“Haspel is personally blocking the declassification and release of key Russiagate documents in the hopes that President Donald Trump will lose his re-election bid, multiple senior U.S. officials told The Federalist. The officials said Haspel, who served under former CIA Director John Brennan as the spy agency’s station chief in London in 2016 and 2017, is concerned that the declassification and release of documents detailing what the CIA was doing during the 2016 election and the 2017 transition could embarrass the CIA and potentially even implicate Haspel herself.”
What Haspel seems to be missing here is that the CIA, and the FBI, of course, have already been embarrassed, greatly, their reputations tarnished almost beyond recognition with tens of millions of U. S. citizens by the Spygate/Russiagate scandal.
She and FBI director Christopher Wray, deluding themselves that they are protecting vital institutions of our society, are apparently waiting with the proverbial bated breath for a Biden administration so that all revelations and potential indictments that might come via John Durham and William Barr are flushed down the equally proverbial memory hole.
It won’t work. The only way to resuscitate those reputations is for them, Haspel and Wray, to be fully transparent, now, before the election.
Even if everything Durham and Barr are investigating is flushed away before reaching fruition, even if the Biden-Harris administration instantly installs a new attorney general and cleanses the DOJ and the intelligence agencies of all remnants of the dreaded Trump over night, tens of millions of Americans already know.
They have already seen at least parts of the story and they won’t forget. How could they?
They know their new president Joe Biden and many allied with him have been implicated in a treasonous plot of previously unheard of proportions to upend the prior administration.
These same people, these millions, now distrust the CIA and the FBI, and, to a great extent, their government. They consider these pivotal institutions their enemies, working against their interests and, more importantly, the interests of the country. And these people are some of the most deeply patriotic of all Americans.
What a situation for our county! How can we then function as a democratic republic?
Did Ms. Haspel think about that? Did Mr. Wray consider that as he withholds or endlessly redacts documents, allegedly to protect… who exactly?
(Wray has taken his desire for a Biden victory to such lengths that he tried to downplay the importance of Antifa.)
Haspel and Wray are doing the reverse of safeguarding their vital institutions. They are increasing public distrust of them, a distrust so great that many of us see our society moving inexorably in the direction of China, a high-tech tyranny of “social credit scores” and obedience to a Big Brother Orwell could never have conceived.
What is the road back from that?
We should be heartened, however, by reports today as President Trump was exiting from Walter Reed Hospital that the president was planning on declassifying and releasing many of these documents himself within days. His chief of staff Mark Meadows was said to have a briefcase stuffed with them.
Perhaps, by the time you read this, you will know more.
If so, Haspel and Wray, to use another old proverb, will have missed the boat. Everyone will know that their agencies need a thorough house cleaning and it will be done, as it should be, without them.
And I will add, although the media will shout the contrary to the hills, though this is October, revealing these documents is in no way an October Surprise. This is information We the People (remember them?) were owed years ago.
When you have been deliberately deceived, that’s no October Surprise. That’s justice.
- Hyliion Electric Truck SPAC Mints 28 Year Old Billionaire CEO
Hyliion Electric Truck SPAC Mints 28 Year Old Billionaire CEO
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 21:45Arising out of the smoke and rubble of Nikola’s recent battle with short sellers, one electric truck company has casually made its way onto the public markets via a SPAC, making its 28 year old founder a billionaire in the process.
Does it feel enough like 1999 yet?
“We were fortunate on timing,” Hyliion Holdings Corp. CEO Thomas Healy told Bloomberg. His company, founded just 5 years ago in 2015, went public through a SPAC with Tortoise Acquisition Corporation and started trading publicly last Friday. Healy is now one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires.
He started his company after watching Tesla while growing up and says that spurred an interest in electric vehicles. “I thought: Why do we have electric technology in cars and not in trucks yet, since trucks are where you can have the biggest impact?” he told Bloomberg.
Healy had originally planned to go public at the time the coronavirus struck. “If we were trying to close right when the stock market was on that downswing, we might have been having different discussions,” he admitted.
The deal has not only garnered scrutiny due to Nikola’s recent fall from grace, but also because the SPAC phenomenon is now being watched closer and through a more skeptical lens. Recall, days ago, we noted that SEC Chair Jay Clayton had said on CNBC that the regulator would “look closer” at the deals.
Like many others who have used SPACs, Healy said the lack of regulation was an obvious benefit. He told Bloomberg:
In the first quarter, we kicked off our next financing round. Going public and being able to bring in more capital than we would staying private was attractive. From that, we considered: do we go down the conventional IPO route? Or do we want a SPAC process? We saw a lot of efficiencies with SPACs. You’re really negotiating a deal with an organization as opposed to going on a roadshow for an IPO that may — or may not — be successful. We met with the Tortoise team introduced to us through investment bank Marathon Capital. That was the moment of ‘OK. Let’s do this!’
“From our end, it was a very natural process with Tortoise. We were just going through a conventional financing fundraising process, and then we saw this as the best path,” he continued.
“Our goal is you’ll be driving down the highway and the trucks you see will have Hyliion powertrains,” Healy said. “There will be other trucks that are electric as well, taking a different approach. We hope all these technologies are successful as ultimately we’re trying to make this shift to electric. The more people are focused on that, the better off we’ll all be.”
But don’t worry Thomas – even if they don’t – you’ll still be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
- "Political Hit Job!" – Trump Slams FDA's Guidance Precluding COVID-19 Vaccine Before Nov. 3
“Political Hit Job!” – Trump Slams FDA’s Guidance Precluding COVID-19 Vaccine Before Nov. 3
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 21:30Update (2115ET): Clearly bored at the residence with nothing on his calendar and nothing to do really but take his meds and rest, President Trump has been on fire, tweeting throughout the day, beginning early in the morning on the East Coast, and continuing well into the night.
In his latest tweet, sent just minutes ago, Trump bashed the FDA’s newly released guidance on the requirements for receiving emergency-use approval for any and all of the many COVID-19 vaccine projects underway. The FDA published the guidance earlier, but cautioned that top officials had spoken with all of the drug companies and that they are well aware of what’s expected of them.
Of course, the provision requiring at least 2 months worth of data pretty much precludes the possibility of approval before election day. Trump clearly doesn’t want that. So – as he often does – he’s using twitter to push back. He even tagged FDA head Dr. Stephen Hahn, who has already apologized profusely for appearing to kowtow to Trump’s political whims.
New FDA Rules make it more difficult for them to speed up vaccines for approval before Election Day. Just another political hit job! @SteveFDA
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The irony is that by bashing the FDA so publicly, Trump is effectively backing the agency into a wall, forcing them to resist his overtures, or risk losing the faith and support of the public. Though, to be fair. The agency knows public trust in the vaccine process is alarmingly low to begin with, and they need to help build it up any way they can.
* * *
Update (1550ET): After the FDA stiff-armed the White House’s attempt to remove a provision from the public-health agency’s emergency use authorization guidelines, White House insiders are telling WSJ that they accept the FDA’s plan, bolstering claims made by FDA Director Dr. Stephen Hahn that the agency wouldn’t be swayed by Trump after appearing to kowtow to the administration.
* * *
Last night, both the NYT, Associated Press and Politico published “scoops” detailing an alleged effort from within the West Wing to improperly shape the FDA’s protocols and policies surrounding granting emergency-use authorization (EUA) to COVID-19 vaccines, with the goal of eliminating a provision that would effectively preclude a vaccine before election day.
Politico’s report claimed that the White House was interfering at the behest of the big drug makers hoping for more lax restrictions.
Since they were published during President Trump’s return to the White House, the reports didn’t get much oxygen on cable news. But on Tuesday morning, the FDA surprised observes by releasing the new guidance.
Also, Bloomberg reported last night that the FDA had communicated its new standards directly to the drug makers, eliminating the need to release the new guidance, which was still under White House review.
A spokesman for the FDA told the press that the agency has already reviewed the requirements with individual manufacturers, and any interference with the guidance is really more of a PR issue.
“This does not change how the FDA would evaluate an emergency use authorization request for a Covid-19 vaccine,” said Michael Felberbaum, an agency spokesman. “The FDA has already communicated with individual manufacturers about its expectations, data the agency intends to consider, and what we expect to see in a request for an emergency use authorization to demonstrate safety and efficacy.”
But as the public backlash intensified, the FDA decided to release a document on its website Tuesday morning making clear that the requirement for two months’ of safety data would remain, as would a requirement for an independent panel of experts to weigh in on each candidate before a final decision can be made.
Here’s more from Bloomberg:
The document is the agency’s most detailed public statement yet on what it will take to get a vaccine cleared under a fast-track emergency use authorization, or EUA. The agency has been working on a separate “guidance” document that details the requirements, but it remains under review by the White House and it’s not clear when or if it will be released.
While the exact contents of that guidance document haven’t been released, the FDA has said that it’s already communicated the requirements to drugmakers. Publishing those requirements in the document released Tuesday essentially makes them public, even if the official document is lodged at the White House. It also makes clear that the FDA will add an extra step to the review.
In Tuesday’s document, the FDA said it will require an additional, follow-up meeting of its Vaccine and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee to look at specific applications by drugmakers. “This discussion will be specific to the particular vaccine that is the subject of the EUA request and will be separate from, and in addition to, any general discussion by the VRBPAC regarding the development, authorization and/or licensure of vaccines to prevent Covid-19,” the FDA said in the document.
Then again, whether the agency requires 8 weeks or 6 weeks of safety data may not make much of a difference. Vaccine approval is a tedious process that typically takes years. The speedy approval process virtually guarantees there will be no study of long term ramifications and side effects.
- John Lennon at 80: One Man Against The Deep State "Monster"
John Lennon at 80: One Man Against The Deep State “Monster”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 21:25Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“You gotta remember, establishment, it’s just a name for evil. The monster doesn’t care whether it kills all the students or whether there’s a revolution. It’s not thinking logically, it’s out of control.”
– John Lennon (1969)
John Lennon, born 80 years ago on October 9, 1940, was a musical genius and pop cultural icon.
He was also a vocal peace protester and anti-war activist, and a high-profile example of the lengths to which the Deep State will go to persecute those who dare to challenge its authority.
Long before Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning were being castigated for blowing the whistle on the government’s war crimes and the National Security Agency’s abuse of its surveillance powers, it was Lennon who was being singled out for daring to speak truth to power about the government’s warmongering, his phone calls monitored and data files illegally collected on his activities and associations.
For a while, at least, Lennon became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.
Years after Lennon’s assassination it would be revealed that the FBI had collected 281 pages of files on him, including song lyrics. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI at the time, directed the agency to spy on the musician. There were also various written orders calling on government agents to frame Lennon for a drug bust. “The FBI’s files on Lennon … read like the writings of a paranoid goody-two-shoes,” observed reporter Jonathan Curiel.
As the New York Times notes, “Critics of today’s domestic surveillance object largely on privacy grounds. They have focused far less on how easily government surveillance can become an instrument for the people in power to try to hold on to power. ‘The U.S. vs. John Lennon’ … is the story not only of one man being harassed, but of a democracy being undermined.”
Indeed, all of the many complaints we have about government today—surveillance, militarism, corruption, harassment, SWAT team raids, political persecution, spying, overcriminalization, etc.—were present in Lennon’s day and formed the basis of his call for social justice, peace and a populist revolution.
For all of these reasons, the U.S. government was obsessed with Lennon, who had learned early on that rock music could serve a political end by proclaiming a radical message. More importantly, Lennon saw that his music could mobilize the public and help to bring about change. Lennon believed in the power of the people. Unfortunately, as Lennon recognized: “The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn’t represent the people. It controls them.”
However, as Martin Lewis writing for Time notes: “John Lennon was not God. But he earned the love and admiration of his generation by creating a huge body of work that inspired and led. The appreciation for him deepened because he then instinctively decided to use his celebrity as a bully pulpit for causes greater than his own enrichment or self-aggrandizement.”
For instance, in December 1971 at a concert in Ann Arbor, Mich., Lennon took to the stage and in his usual confrontational style belted out “John Sinclair,” a song he had written about a man sentenced to 10 years in prison for possessing two marijuana cigarettes. Within days of Lennon’s call for action, the Michigan Supreme Court ordered Sinclair released.
What Lennon did not know at the time was that government officials had been keeping strict tabs on the ex-Beatle they referred to as “Mr. Lennon.” Incredibly, FBI agents were in the audience at the Ann Arbor concert, “taking notes on everything from the attendance (15,000) to the artistic merits of his new song.”
The U.S. government, steeped in paranoia, was spying on Lennon.
By March 1971, when his “Power to the People” single was released, it was clear where Lennon stood. Having moved to New York City that same year, Lennon was ready to participate in political activism against the U. S. government, the “monster” that was financing the war in Vietnam.
The release of Lennon’s Sometime in New York City album, which contained a radical anti-government message in virtually every song and depicted President Richard Nixon and Chinese Chairman Mao Tse-tung dancing together nude on the cover, only fanned the flames of the conflict to come.
The official U.S. war against Lennon began in earnest in 1972 after rumors surfaced that Lennon planned to embark on a U.S. concert tour that would combine rock music with antiwar organizing and voter registration. Nixon, fearing Lennon’s influence on about 11 million new voters (1972 was the first year that 18-year-olds could vote), had the ex-Beatle served with deportation orders “in an effort to silence him as a voice of the peace movement.”
Then again, the FBI has had a long history of persecuting, prosecuting and generally harassing activists, politicians, and cultural figures. Most notably among the latter are such celebrated names as folk singer Pete Seeger, painter Pablo Picasso, comic actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, comedian Lenny Bruce and poet Allen Ginsberg.
Among those most closely watched by the FBI was Martin Luther King Jr., a man labeled by the FBI as “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” With wiretaps and electronic bugs planted in his home and office, King was kept under constant surveillance by the FBI with the aim of “neutralizing” him. He even received letters written by FBI agents suggesting that he either commit suicide or the details of his private life would be revealed to the public. The FBI kept up its pursuit of King until he was felled by a hollow-point bullet to the head in 1968.
While Lennon was not—as far as we know—being blackmailed into suicide, he was the subject of a four-year campaign of surveillance and harassment by the U.S. government (spearheaded by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover), an attempt by President Richard Nixon to have him “neutralized” and deported. As Adam Cohen of the New York Times points out, “The F.B.I.’s surveillance of Lennon is a reminder of how easily domestic spying can become unmoored from any legitimate law enforcement purpose. What is more surprising, and ultimately more unsettling, is the degree to which the surveillance turns out to have been intertwined with electoral politics.”
As Lennon’s FBI file shows, memos and reports about the FBI’s surveillance of the anti-war activist had been flying back and forth between Hoover, the Nixon White House, various senators, the FBI and the U.S. Immigration Office.
Nixon’s pursuit of Lennon was relentless and in large part based on the misperception that Lennon and his comrades were planning to disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention. The government’s paranoia, however, was misplaced.
Left-wing activists who were on government watch lists and who shared an interest in bringing down the Nixon Administration had been congregating at Lennon’s New York apartment. But when they revealed that they were planning to cause a riot, Lennon balked. As he recounted in a 1980 interview, “We said, We ain’t buying this. We’re not going to draw children into a situation to create violence so you can overthrow what? And replace it with what? . . . It was all based on this illusion, that you can create violence and overthrow what is, and get communism or get some right-wing lunatic or a left-wing lunatic. They’re all lunatics.”
Despite the fact that Lennon was not part of the “lunatic” plot, the government persisted in its efforts to have him deported. Equally determined to resist, Lennon dug in and fought back. Every time he was ordered out of the country, his lawyers delayed the process by filing an appeal. Finally, in 1976, Lennon won the battle to stay in the country when he was granted a green card. As he said afterwards, “I have a love for this country…. This is where the action is. I think we’ll just go home, open a tea bag, and look at each other.”
Lennon’s time of repose didn’t last long, however. By 1980, he had re-emerged with a new album and plans to become politically active again.
The old radical was back and ready to cause trouble. In his final interview on Dec. 8, 1980, Lennon mused, “The whole map’s changed and we’re going into an unknown future, but we’re still all here, and while there’s life there’s hope.”
The Deep State has a way of dealing with troublemakers, unfortunately. On Dec. 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman was waiting in the shadows when Lennon returned to his New York apartment building. As Lennon stepped outside the car to greet the fans congregating outside, Chapman, in an eerie echo of the FBI’s moniker for Lennon, called out, “Mr. Lennon!”
Lennon turned and was met with a barrage of gunfire as Chapman—dropping into a two-handed combat stance—emptied his .38-caliber pistol and pumped four hollow-point bullets into his back and left arm. Lennon stumbled, staggered forward and, with blood pouring from his mouth and chest, collapsed to the ground.
John Lennon was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. He had finally been “neutralized.”
Yet where those who neutralized the likes of John Lennon, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy and others go wrong is in believing that you can murder a movement with a bullet and a madman.
Thankfully, Lennon’s legacy lives on in his words, his music and his efforts to speak truth to power. As Yoko Ono shared in a 2014 letter to the parole board tasked with determining whether Chapman should be released: “A man of humble origin, [John Lennon] brought light and hope to the whole world with his words and music. He tried to be a good power for the world, and he was. He gave encouragement, inspiration and dreams to people regardless of their race, creed and gender.”
Sadly, not much has changed for the better in the world since Lennon walked among us.
Peace remains out of reach. Activism and whistleblowers continue to be prosecuted for challenging the government’s authority. Militarism is on the rise, with local police dressed like the military, all the while the governmental war machine continues to wreak havoc on innocent lives across the globe.
For those of us who joined with John Lennon to imagine a world of peace, it’s getting harder to reconcile that dream with the reality of the American police state.
Meanwhile, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, those who dare to speak up are labeled dissidents, troublemakers, terrorists, lunatics, or mentally ill and tagged for surveillance, censorship, involuntary detention or, worse, even shot and killed in their own homes by militarized police.
As Lennon shared in a 1968 interview:
“I think all our society is run by insane people for insane objectives… I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal means. If anybody can put on paper what our government and the American government and the Russian… Chinese… what they are actually trying to do, and what they think they’re doing, I’d be very pleased to know what they think they’re doing. I think they’re all insane. But I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.”
So what’s the answer?
Lennon had a multitude of suggestions.
“If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.”
“War is over if you want it.”
“Produce your own dream…. It’s quite possible to do anything, but not to put it on the leaders…. You have to do it yourself. That’s what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called holy and worshipped for the cover of the book and not for what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always will be. There’s nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can’t wake you up. You can wake you up. I can’t cure you. You can cure you.”
“Peace is not something you wish for; It’s something you make, Something you do, Something you are, And something you give away.”
“If you want peace, you won’t get it with violence.”
And my favorite advice of all: “Say you want a revolution / We better get on right away / Well you get on your feet / And out on the street / Singing power to the people.”
- Bill Gates Contradicts Trump, Says Wealthy West Won't Get 'Back To Normal' Until Late 2021
Bill Gates Contradicts Trump, Says Wealthy West Won’t Get ‘Back To Normal’ Until Late 2021
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 21:05Bill Gates sat down with WSJ Editor in Chief Matt Murray for a virtual chat during the paper’s CEO Council, part of the paper’s nascent push into conferences and events.
This, of course, is just the latest installment in Bill Gates’ campaign to convince western governments to essentially “step up” and finance a global mandatory vaccination campaign, something that would cost trillions of dollars, given the 7 billion-plus people in the world.
And he doesn’t hold back: Gates acknowledged that Western countries are “far ahead” of Russia and China when it comes to developing and testing various vaccine candidates – though China seems to draw nearer by the day – and if the leading candidates prove successful and win their FDA emergency approvals before year-end, the west could see life return to ‘some semblance of normal’ by the second half of next year.
“By late next year you can have things going back pretty close to normal – that’s the best case,” Gates said. “We still don’t know whether these vaccines will succeed,” Gates said. “Now the capacity will take time to ramp up. And so the allocation within the US, and between the U.S. and other countries will be a very top point of contention.”
Of course, Gates’s timeline is even longer than that unfurled by the Trump Administration and its top officials who have said a mass-produced vaccine could be ready by the beginning of Q2, suggesting vaccination campaigns could be well underway by the start of next summer.
All this remains to be seen, however.
Western companies are “far ahead” of their foreign competitors, and Gates predicted that Chinese and Russian vaccines likely wouldn’t be widely used in the West. Though, to be fair, Russia and China are already striking deals with countries to partner and produce doses as countries like India scramble to get their hands on a vaccine as quickly as possible.
“The one Russian construct and six of the Chinese constructs are perfectly valid constructs actually with some similarities to what the Western companies are doing, but the Western companies are further ahead on doing these phase three studies,” Gates said.
As he typically does, Gates took a minute to plug CEPI, the coalition for epidemic preparedness and innovations.
The conversation soon turned to another one of Bill Gates’s favorite topics: the obligation of social media companies to combat “misinformation”, like the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab.
There’s a difference between claims that are deliberately “false and misleading” and the theory that the virus was either released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Biosafety Level 4 lab located a short distance from the market initially touted as ‘ground zero’ for the virus. US intelligence has lent some credence to the theory. So has a Chinese scientist who escaped to the West with claims that she has ‘proof’ that the virus was created in a lab.
Though her claims were given airing by Tucker Carlson, Twitter suspended her account in an attempt to silence her, just like Beijing tried to do.
Circling back to Gates, he argued that social media companies should be responsible for “some level of fact checking”, though he advised that he didn’t want to see widespread censorship, like in China.
“There’s certainly a human weakness that very titillating things can spread very quickly and the digital platforms allow them,” Gates said.
“We’re seeing in a very urgent way the question of how do you restrict that weakness and still preserve free speech.”
Put another way, social media companies should censor things that Gates wants censored, and leaving everything else pretty much alone.
Watch the full interview below:
- With Real Rates Rising, Is The Fed Preparing A Digital Dollar?
With Real Rates Rising, Is The Fed Preparing A Digital Dollar?
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 20:45Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,
It pays today to never underestimate the venality of the people who think they run the world. It also pays to listen to them when they say the most outrageous things.
At virtual Jackson Hole this year FOMC Chair Jerome Powell redefined inflation for the third time in my lifetime. By removing the Phillips Curve from the landscape Powell will now guide monetary policy by the desire to create inflation expectations, a kind of first derivative of inflation under the mostly irrelevant Quantity Theory of Money (QTM).
I talked about Powell’s dilemma and why he had to make this change in a post right after that speech. And I outlined what the Austrian criticism of the QTM was — a myopic focus on the supply of money rather than the interplay of it with the demand for money.
The better definition of inflation expectations is to think of it as the velocity of human action.
Now I’m sympathetic, for argument’s sake, to define inflation expectations as the first derivative of action. If you expect things to get better than you may make choices which lead to lower time preference behavior which, in turn, boosts investment in larger projects and an expansion of the division of labor.
Economic growth.
But that growth is dependent on your starting point. If things truly suck, making things somewhat better doesn’t mean you’ll put a new roof on your house or start a new business but it may mean that you spend a little more money on better food.
Because of this systemic degradation of inflation expectations and the squeezing out of available investment capital, the Fed would always reach a point where it could not use interest rates to manipulate aggregate demand and boost GDP — Gross National Spending.
The economy always reaches a point where interest rates are irrelevant to creating confidence to take on new debt. I like to use the term ‘debt saturation’ to describe where we are.
Now with Jay Powell’s speech from virtual Jackson Hole, we have him openly admitting this, validating the Austrian criticism. And so, we have the new definition of inflation, freed from the shackles of the Phillips Curve.
It’s still all about prices today but now the Fed is admitting that the economy runs on the time preference of individuals rather than arbitrary definitions of full employment.
Powell uses the term ‘inflation expectations’ but time preference is still better.
This change by Powell was presaged by a recent white paper which Zerohedge and others brought to wide attention about creating inflation through helicopter money, so-called digital dollars.
This is nothing new now, we’ve been talking about this for weeks.
Those digital dollars will be given to you to spend and you won’t be able to convert them to physical cash. Cash will be sunsetted and there will be no hiding from whatever policy The Davos Crowd wants to implement.
To roll this ball forward there has to be a major impetus to change things and that means another phase to the financial crisis. So, with that in mind I bring you this tweet from Danielle DiMartino Booth from ten days ago, that finally showed up on my radar neatly reminding me that Twitter doesn’t have my best interests in mind.
This is THE MOST IMPORTANT TWEET I’LL SEND THIS WEEK. The Fed so fears building disinflationary pressures it’s buying all the TIPS it can get its hands in an ATTEMPT to force inflation narrative into investors’ psyches. THAT’S FEAR
@bondstrategist https://t.co/XRCoJcxh8Y
— Danielle DiMartino Booth (@DiMartinoBooth) September 25, 2020
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Now why would the Fed be buying TIPS if not to manage inflation expectations?
TIPS are weird because both their price and their yield rise with rising inflation and conversely with deflation. Buying TIPS means the Fed is propping up their prices to tell everyone that real interest rates are not rising!
Pay no attention to the deflation behind the curtain!
But they are. And rising real yields is a real problem for the Fed if it wants to keep the monetary system from melting down globally. TIPS prices wouldn’t need supporting if real yields weren’t rising, which means inflation expectations are falling.
And what happened in the all-important 10-year Treasury market in recent days after the end of Q3 ended with a Fed-induced whimper?
Now we have nominal yields rising, TIPS prices supported and one of the winners over the past few days has been gold? Gold is supposed fall with rising real yields, and yet, it’s rising because this notion that the Fed is buying TIPS means we’re getting safe haven inflows, not investment inflows into gold.
This furthers the argument that gold only follows real yields when markets aren’t under stress. When faith in governments begin to fail for real, gold de-couples from financial assets of all types and trades to its own beat.
But back to this week’s bond market carnage. So, did the Fed finally stop buying TIPS or have we entered another short-lived reflation trade now that Q3 is behind us, thanks to Trump surviving COVID-19?
Or were the temporary positions taken by banks to manipulate their balance sheets for earnings unwound and that’s causing a shock to the yield curve because real rates are rising faster than the Fed can schlorp them up?
I think, honestly, it doesn’t matter no matter how explosive all of this may actually be. As the stimulus game of chicken continues on Capitol Hill the markets keep hoping for some sign of help. But the best they have is that Biden’s chances of winning the election are fading along with his cognition.
Wall St. may be coming out trying to spin a Biden victory as good for the markets but that would only be because Pelosi will blackmail them with endless stimulus and the promise of the new Fed e-dollar.
But what is most obvious to me is there is no appetite to give Trump any help in getting re-elected. Whether Powell bought tons of TIPS to keep the markets from crashing into the end of the quarter or not is a mostly academic question.
What’s clear now is the agenda I’ve outlined previously as the Democrats’ and The Davos Crowd’s strategy for the future. If you want to eat, give us all the power. If you want to keep your house, give us all the power.
And, more importantly, accept the new reality that is coming whether you like it or not. There’s a Great Reset coming and it won’t matter who you vote for.
Jay Powell is just the bag man, folks. He’s a bystander in all of this.
* * *
Join My Patreon if you want help navigating the Great Reset. Install the Brave Browser if you think Google is part of The Great Reset.
- California Wildfires Take "Unfathomable" Toll On Napa Wineries
California Wildfires Take “Unfathomable” Toll On Napa Wineries
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 20:25The 2020 vintage in Napa Valley has been stressful for vineyards. There were virus-related lockdowns, severe droughts, heatwaves, and now unprecedented wildfires.
The harvest season for Napa’s vineyards began in August and will last through October. But this year, some vineyards have been destroyed during the wildfire season, while others have had harmful smoke from the fires taint the grapes, reported Bloomberg.
Cal Fire’s latest fire report shows 4 million acres across the state have burned this year.
“The 4 million marks is unfathomable. It boggles the mind, and it takes your breath away,” Cal Fire spokesman Scott McLean said Sunday. “And that number will grow.”
Last week, we pointed out that attention should quickly turn to a “fast-moving wildfire is ripping in Northern California’s wine country. Called Glass Fire, which ignited a little more than a week ago, has been burning in Napa and Sonoma counties. As of Monday, the fire has scorched 66,840 acres and is 41% contained.
The blaze has damaged or destroyed at least 18 wineries in Napa Valley as more than 215 are under mandatory evacuation orders or evacuation warnings.
Some of the wineries that have sustained fire damage include Chateau Boswell, Hunnicutt, Hourglass, Dutch Henry, Fairwinds, Burgess Cellars, and Castello di Amoros. Damage has also been reported at Behrens, Newton, Cain, Flying Lady, Sherwin, School House, Fantesca, and Spring Mountain Vineyard.
Philippe Melka, a winemaking consultant for high-profile wineries, told Bloomberg that chemical compounds in smoke could easily be absorbed into grapes’ skin, making the wine smell and taste like ash.
Melka estimates around 80% of vineyards in Napa could be affected by smoke. He said wineries in the south of Napa could have escaped smoke damage.
“But in a year like this,” he said, “who will pay $300 for any wines?”
Napa wineries contribute about $34 billion in revenue to the US economy, provide thousands of jobs, and create a stable local economy for Napa. Moving forward, that could all change, as damaged vineyards could take years to recover. Melka doesn’t expect premium cabernets from Napa this year, given the widespread smoke damage.
Some wineries are not even considering picking grapes this harvest season for cabernet. Schramsberg Vineyards, which bottles under the J. Davies brand, said there will be no cabernet this year.
Wine entrepreneur Jeff Smith, the owner of Hourglass Winery, said, “we don’t know if the grapes are smoke tainted, because it now takes 24 to 30 days to get results… The labs are inundated. The industry has never had anything like this amount of smoke.”
Winemaker Chris Howell of Cain Vineyard and Winery, said, “we’ll reprune some vines, but we won’t learn the truth of the vineyard until 2021… If the damage is only from smoke, they may recover for the next growing season.”
Howell said if the vineyard has to be replanted, and it could take two to three years and cost $50,000 to $85,000 an acre. And for top cabernet, the plants must be at least 5-7 years old before grapes can be used.
Given the immense smoke damage or at least the preliminary estimates, while other vineyards have been burned to the ground, the 2020 vintage could quickly produce a shortage of premium cabernets from Napa.
- The Pandemic That Killed Debate
The Pandemic That Killed Debate
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 20:05Authored by Stacey Rudin via The American Institute for Economic Research,
arl Sagan famously said, “the cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.” This wisdom has been sadly forsaken during the COVID19 pandemic, when one powerful narrative has taken not only the public, but the scientific community, by storm.
The story is that societies cannot survive the pandemic without society-wide lockdowns until we have a vaccine, despite the fact that we have never had a vaccine for a coronavirus, vaccines usually take many years to develop, and many of them are not all that effective once made.
Penetrating this narrative has been incredibly difficult even for impeccably credentialed scientists.
One might even say that this pandemic killed scientific debate.
Even as evidence proving that lockdowns do not stop the virus rolls in by the truckload, the scientists who argue for a different approach are marginalized, censored, affixed with disparaging labels, and ostracized. Sweden’s chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was accused of “leading Sweden to catastrophe” and of “experimenting” on the Swedish people. Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt’s careful studies and models were labeled “lethal nonsense” as he weathered attacks left, right and center. John Ioannidis, one of the world’s most productive scientists, found his studies smeared and ignored. Sunetra Gupta, one of the world’s foremost epidemiologists at The University of Oxford, found that expressing her wide-ranging infectious disease knowledge suddenly made her “unethical and dangerous.”
The latest smear target is neuroradiologist and health policy expert Dr. Scott Atlas, formerly of Stanford.
A longtime lockdown dissenter, his principal and latest offense seems to be agreeing to serve on The White House’s coronavirus task force, although Anthony Fauci – a researcher who funds grants, and who is not a public health expert – is permitted to do so without adverse media coverage. Where Dr. Atlas and Dr. Fauci differ is in their fundamental approach to the virus:
Fauci believes we can never return to normal, while Atlas believes all low-risk groups should do just that, with protective measures targeted towards vulnerable populations.
Atlas believes epidemics end with herd immunity, while Fauci apparently believes they end if you lock down well enough for long enough, and then fundamentally change your way of life because you now have the insight that more pandemics will occur.
Many of Atlas’s former Stanford colleagues publicly took issue with his age-focused pandemic management strategy on September 9, when 98 of them signed a letter leveling the serious accusation of “[fostering] falsehoods and misrepresentations of science.” Omitted from the letter are the alleged misrepresentations and lies, “making scientific discourse difficult.” This injustice was noted by infectious disease expert Martin Kulldorff of Harvard Medical School, who responded with his own letter published – not without some gentle prodding — in the Stanford Daily on September 16. Kulldorff explained his longstanding agreement with Atlas’s position that an age-targeted strategy is needed to minimize casualties as well as collateral damage during the pandemic – “the most compassionate approach . . . is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection”— and invited the letter’s signatories to publicly debate this strategy.
Among experts on infectious disease outbreaks, many of us have long advocated for an age-targeted strategy, and I would be delighted to debate this with any of the 98 signatories. Supporters include professor Sunetra Gupta at Oxford University, the world’s preeminent infectious disease epidemiologist. Assuming no bias against women scientists of color, I urge Stanford faculty and students to read her thoughts.
Professor Kulldorff received no reply to this offer, so The Soho Forum — a highly respected debate platform — took up the case, personally inviting the scientists to participate in an online, one-on-one debate via Zoom, taking the negative on this resolution:
To minimize mortality and optimize public health, the U.S. should implement a targeted coronavirus strategy that better protects the old and other high-risk groups, while letting children and young adults live close to normal lives.
This offer was emailed to Dr. Philip Pizzo, the chief signatory of Stanford’s letter in opposition to Atlas, who replied simply:
“Thank you for the invitation. We have conveyed what we have to say in our letter and do not have additional comments to offer.”
From both a public policy and scientific standpoint, this blanket refusal to engage in discourse is concerning.
When someone can level an accusation of dishonesty at a public figure, refuse to debate the substance with the accused, and suffer no consequences for this behavior, this stifles the free expression of opinions and ideas. This is not good for anyone except entities trying to control a self-serving narrative, which never turns out well for anyone else — especially those with the least power.
The best system for a humane and compassionate society is one that encourages the free expression of ideas. This practice must be encouraged and rewarded, not stifled and penalized. Ideas should be openly expressed, disagreement voiced, and the undecided parties credited with the intelligence they possess: they listen to both sides, and come to their own conclusions. The alternative — some narrative-maker decides the information that will be provided, withholds contradictory relevant information, and forbids the defense from speaking at all— is fascism. It is tyranny. It is certainly not American. Americans have always known that it is dangerous to restrict debate while placing “authority” in one person or entity: that is why our government is built on checks and balances, on divided bodies of congress, on term limits and the electoral college and and separation of powers.
Experts differ and disagree, on every subject. Intelligent people, coming from various backgrounds and with all manner of life and professional experience, will choose their own side, and once this goes on for long enough, the correct result will arrive. Neither public policy or science is ever completely settled, so the restriction of debate hurts everyone. The voicing of innovative ideas and solutions is what helps us.
We should celebrate people like Scott Atlas who are willing to take the unpopular, minority view — maybe we can learn from them. We should pay careful attention once we know their opponents will not only sling mud, but will not even appear for a debate.
- Stephen Miller Latest White House Official To Test Positive For COVID-19
Stephen Miller Latest White House Official To Test Positive For COVID-19
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 19:56Angry lefties are taking to social media to express their glee over the news that Stephen Miller, a senior aide to President Trump widely seen as the architect of his immigration policy (known to liberals as “kids in cages”), has become the latest White House staffer to test positive with COVID-19.
By our count, that makes him the 33rd person infected in the White House outbreak by our count, which includes 11 staffers who tested positive after the debate in Cleveland. According to NBC News, the number stands at 23.
Another VERY big shoe drops in @WhiteHouse — key #Trump advisor and architect of anti-immigration policies Steve Miller has #COVID19 .
Also, a Joint-Chiefs-of-Staff aide USCG Admiral got infected in WH Trump mtg last week: Now entire joint chiefs meet virtually.
MORE https://t.co/Ym9xA3BSXT— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) October 6, 2020
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The applause from the left rolled in on Twitter.
With Stephen Miller infected, coronavirus has done more to fight white supremacy than our own President.
— Devin Duke (@sirDukeDevin) October 6, 2020
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I’m hearing that Stephen Miller tested positive for Covid, which doesn’t add up… don’t you need to have blood in your body to get infected?
— Kole Rossuary (@koleross) October 6, 2020
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Alarming to hear that the coronavirus has been infected with Stephen Miller. Truly, no-one is safe.
— Michael Marshall Smith (@ememess) October 6, 2020
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Roxane Gay cheered news of Miller’s infection, claiming it as another example of the power of “Libra Season”.
LIBRA SEASON! RECOGNIZE OUR POWER.
— roxane gay (@rgay) October 6, 2020
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I am thrilled to know Stephen Miller has COVID. He is evil. I hope he doesn’t infect any non-evil people. pic.twitter.com/9vHg3KorA0
— roxane gay (@rgay) October 6, 2020
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Miller has released a statement to the press: “I have been working remotely and self-isolating, testing negative every day through yesterday. Today, I tested positive for COVID-19 and am in quarantine.” His plans regarding the length of his quarantine aren’t clear. According to the New York Daily News, it was “not immediately clear” whether Miller attended the Sept. 26 ceremony announcing Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination.
Miller has been working from home since Friday.
It also appears that the military aide who tested positive – reported earlier today – is among those responsible for carrying the “football” that contains launch codes for nuclear weapons has also tested positive, a person familiar with the matter said.
- Biden Says "We Shouldn't Have Debate" Next Week If Trump Still Has Coronavirus
Biden Says “We Shouldn’t Have Debate” Next Week If Trump Still Has Coronavirus
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 19:54Will there be another debate or won’t there?
While Trump is certainly eager to get back on the podium, and certainly not in some virtual setting, his challenger is not so sure.
Moments after the NYT published an Editorial Board op-ed arguing that “In-Person Debates Are Too Dangerous. Cancel Them”, Joe Biden spoke at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania, Joe Biden said Tuesday night that he and Donald Trump should scrap their next debate if the president is still infected with the coronavirus.
“I think if he still has Covid we shouldn’t have a debate,” Biden told reporters.
The next debate is scheduled for next Thursday, Oct. 15 in Miami. Which likely means that Trump will have to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that neither he, nor anyone on his debate prep team is contagious in just over a week. Considering that most of those people are, in fact, infected as of this moment, that could prove a tall order, and may force the next debate to be virtual.
Update- WH debate prep room & Covid
President Trump: Positive
Kellyanne Conway: Positive
Bill Stepien: Positive
Hope Hicks: Positive
Chris Christie Positive Stephen Miller Positive
Rudy Giuliani – negative so far
Jason Miller – negative so far https://t.co/Gf5rtX7ZMS— Dana Bash (@DanaBashCNN) October 6, 2020
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Which simply means just as much shouting, only by zoom… unless of course the two agree to a mute button.
- Taiwan Presents Weapons Shopping List To US At Key Defense Industry Conference
Taiwan Presents Weapons Shopping List To US At Key Defense Industry Conference
Tyler Durden
Tue, 10/06/2020 – 19:45Taiwan is set to present a veritable weapons shopping list to American officials during the annual US-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference, which began Monday and is continuing Tuesday.
The conference is yet another event attracting the ire and watchful scrutiny of China, given it is representative of the growing military cooperation between Taipei and Washington, and goes back to 2002.
Taiwan military drills, via CNN However, weapons sales will be a closed-door discussion issue. Among closed-door topics include “US defense cooperation with Taiwan, the defense procurement process and Taiwan’s defence and national security needs,” the council said according to South China Morning Post. It will also “provide opportunities to connect with others working on Taiwan defense and national security issues.”
Also sure to catch Beijing’s notice following last month’s ratcheting PLA aerial and sea drills around the island is the following statement on the conference agenda: “Taiwan’s deputy defense minister Chang Guan-chung is expected to brief the US side on the weaponry most needed and urgently sought by the island after seeing growing military intimidation from Beijing.”
Ahead of the conference Reuters pointed out last month the US is content to further build up ‘Fortress Taiwan’ while “needling China” – as it “plans to sell as many as seven major weapons systems, including mines, cruise missiles and drones to Taiwan, four people familiar with the discussions said, as the Trump administration ramps up pressure on China.”
That prior extensive report previewed Taiwan’s ‘defense needs’ – some of which are in various phases of passing US legal hurdles and discussions, according to Reuters :
- Drones that can see over the horizon for surveillance and targeting, coupled with advanced missiles and coastal defenses that include smart mines and anti-submarine capabilities to impede a sea invasion…
- A Lockheed Martin-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), essentially a truck-based rocket launcher, is among the weapons Taiwan wants, people familiar with the negotiations said.
- at least four large sophisticated aerial drones to Taiwan for what could be about $600 million.
- under discussion are land-based Boeing-made Harpoon anti-ship missiles to serve as a coastal defense against cruise missiles.
- Other systems include “underwater sea mines and other capabilities to deter amphibious landing, or immediate attack,” Taiwan’s de facto ambassador here to United States said in July.
Anti-tank missile systems are also said to be under consideration, at a moment Chinese PLA naval and aerial drills near the island have been on the uptick. Beijing has repeatedly signaled that it considers reunification as a landmark mission and won’t stand idly by as external forces intervene in what it sees as inter-China affairs.
For this week’s US-Taiwan Defense Industry Conference, no US official will need to visit the island given the talks are being done entirely by remote means due to the global pandemic.
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